Perhaps I am an old fuddy-duddy, but I am becoming distressed with the level of whining on the Mantic board.

"Boohoo! My rulebook isn't here yet!"

"Boohoo! I don't like that rule!"

"Boohoo! I have to wait for my miniatures!"

"Boohoo! Alex Holker doesn't like my idea!"

CRAP!

Just put a lid on it and wait your turn! All manufactured things take time. Even your Mommy takes time to get things done. If you don't believe me, just climb out of her basement and go ask her! If you don't like the rules, don't play them! Or better yet, write your own "perfect rules" so the rest of the world can savage them. You'll find it isn't so easy to be the author when thousands of internet trolls descend upon you and your hard work. Do you think that proposing rule changes now is a bit late? Like really, really late? The books are printed. What do you want them to do, make changes in crayon for you before they ship the book? Or maybe make changes between the printings? Really? Perhaps you want them to magic your miniatures into existence? Or maybe if you wish really hard they will appear under your pillow in your Mommy's basement! And who care what Alex Holker thinks? He's a git-troll anyway! He's another one that ought to write his own rules and make his own miniatures so that the world can do to them what he does to everything Mantic.

Popularity brings more whiners. And whiners, much like fans, tend to post more than the average joe. Throw in a healthy dose of people expecting KoW and Mantic to just be GW but cheaper, and you have a prescription for annoyance.

This is a refuge where we can share our opinions -- and the benefit is that most of the folks on here have proven a fondness for Mantic. So if they don't glow about something, at least you can believe it may be a measured and thought-out disagreement.

I'm still clueless about what AH actually expects. I'ms starting to honestly think he believes he should be their designer and they should just make whatever he wants, regardless of anyone else's opinion.

Yeah, rules feedback is great. I do think it should be done based on IRL playtesting primarily though, unless it's something obvious (e.g. movement trays for warpath would speed up the game).

I don't look at the rules with the perspective of changing the rules, I just find it interesting to see if they can be explained more clearly and have their wordcount reduced further... not making any changes to the rules at all, just re-wording.

The Nerve change was a great example of something which completely removed a chunk of text and a table from the book, but didn't change the rules at all... that's the kind of thing we need to come up with as far as ideas.. little strokes of genius that make the game quicker/easier without actually changing anything at all.

It's refinement that is the interesting thing at this point of the KoW rules..might be interesting to see if we can release a version of KoW (under that new CC license) that doesn't change any of the rules, but is just as clear or clearer and cuts down the wordcount by 30-40%.

Something like that could then be given back to Mantic to let them make smaller mini-rulebooks, or quick reference sheets.

But that's an example of constructive stuff, as opposed to the Alex Holker approach of:

1. "Whine about Warpath, make rules suggestions".2. "Alessio actually takes on board one suggestion and adds it to Warpath".3. "Continue to whine because all of your ideas were not added".

His rule suggestion for Warpath (crushing strength for vehicles) wasn't the best of ideas either, since I keep seeing video battle reports for Warpath where everyone keeps mentioning how much more effective vehicles are when you just use them to run thing over instead of shooting with them.

As for everyone else, we're going to get a whole host of new people on the forums, so we're just going to have to deal with repeated discussions of things that we already talked about to death over a year ago.

Most of the newbies seem to be a good bunch though, I haven't seen much in the way of complaints or requests for the rules to become GW-lite... there's a few, but there's a lot more of them just posting awesome stuff like this:

I don't look at the rules with the perspective of changing the rules, I just find it interesting to see if they can be explained more clearly and have their wordcount reduced further... not making any changes to the rules at all, just re-wording.

snip

It's refinement that is the interesting thing at this point of the KoW rules..might be interesting to see if we can release a version of KoW (under that new CC license) that doesn't change any of the rules, but is just as clear or clearer and cuts down the wordcount by 30-40%.

Snip

As for everyone else, we're going to get a whole host of new people on the forums, so we're just going to have to deal with repeated discussions of things that we already talked about to death over a year ago.

I was big into DBA years ago. Simple and elegant rules with a few quirks. Since they covered 5000 years of land combat, there were situations and armies that didn't work the way history said they did in reality. So, an intrepid group began a project to clarify DBA. They turned 4 pages of rules into 40+ pages of clarification. This pretty much sucked the fun out of the game for me. I really don't want to see that here either. I have faith that the fine folks on this forum will not do that, that we will come to a reasoned solution to the problems that arise.

As for new folks, I agree that we will suffer through teething pains. I don't mind the reasoned argument. I absolutely hate the "I just read the rules and here's what needs to be changed" argument. So far, I haven't seen anything in KOW or WP that can't be overcome with the slightest application of common sense.

Let's face it, KOW and WP are rules in their infancy that will have growing and teething pains. In the final analysis, they are arguably the best rules out today for this level of gaming. It will be interesting to see if they wander into the skirmish and monsterous battle levels.

The more refined answer would be that we are having a reasoned discussion concerning the disturbing trend of the newer members to the KOW community to foment unrest be placing unrealistic expectations on Mantic.

To be fair to the whining gits, Mantic announced a release date of June 25th which has long since passed. I don't understand why we can't see the new army lists when most of the pathfinders have copies of them.